Symform

» see symform.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Dropbox and Box both answered the storage question the same way, by buying buildings full of disks and charging you rent on a slice of them. Symform's founders, Praerit Garg and Bassam Tabbara, had both come out of Microsoft and thought the economics of that were wrong. Their company, started in Seattle in 2007, ran a cloud service without owning the cloud.

The arrangement was a barter. You installed the Symform client, pointed it at a folder, and also gave the network some unused capacity on your own drive. Your backup then went out in pieces: the file was encrypted locally and erasure-coded into fragments spread across many other members' machines, with enough parity that a large number of peers could vanish at once and your data would still reconstruct. Nobody holding a fragment could read anything, and nobody needed to be online for you to restore.

The pitch worked best on small businesses with a server closet and terabytes of spare spindles nobody was using. By 2014 Symform reported 45,000 customers in 170 countries and had taken in roughly $20 million across its funding rounds.

~ the chronicle ~

~ sold for the price of a house ~

In 2014 Quantum Corporation, a company whose business was tape libraries and enterprise backup appliances, acquired Symform's technology and its development team. The reported figure was around $500,000. Twenty million dollars of venture money went in and half a million came out, and the thing being bought was not the customer base but the distributed storage engine and the people who understood it.

Quantum said at the time that Symform would extend its cloud software capabilities. What it did with it was decide, within two years, that its strategic focus was enterprises and that a consumer-and-small-business peer network was not part of that.

~ thirty-one days of read-only ~

The wind-down had a shape worth recording, because it was more orderly than most. Customers kept full access and full functionality until 30 June 2016. Through July the service ran read-only, with the clients no longer syncing anything upward, so you could pull your data down but not put any more in. On 31 July the accounts became inaccessible and every remaining file was deleted from Quantum's servers.

That is a month of grace, clearly announced in June, with the two phases separated so nobody could mistake a frozen service for a working one. Compared to a locker that goes dark on a Tuesday with no notice, it was a decent exit.

~ the idea outlived the company ~

A service whose free tier asked you to donate disk space would have been a difficult sell where I live, for a reason that has nothing to do with trust. Upstream bandwidth on a Turkish consumer line in 2012 was a fraction of the download figure, and a backup product that has to push fragments out continuously wants exactly the direction of the pipe that ADSL gave you least of. The architecture assumed a symmetric connection that most of the world did not have.

Paying for storage with storage instead of with money is an idea that keeps coming back, and it has been rebuilt several times since under a blockchain instead of a subscription. The engineering problem was never the hard part. The hard part was convincing a business that its backups living in fragments on other people's computers was safer than a hard disk in the office, which is a math argument against an instinct, and the instinct usually wins.

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